The Sun and Fog contested
by jomiddlemarch
Summary: Her mother had said, a door, once opened, can never be fully closed again. Mary understands this now.


"He pushed me away. I don't think you saw that, Madame von Olnhausen, but he did."

Mary forced herself to look directly at Mlle. Lisette Beaufort, who'd knocked and been bidden to enter, even though dread grew within Mary with every light footstep the Frenchwoman took. She'd never known what to make of her, exactly how or why the other woman had arrived at Mansion House, though she'd been ashamed of her immediate suspicion when Mlle. Beaufort greeted Jed with so much familiarity, a tone she took with no other at the hospital, for all that Dr. Hale seemed pitifully eager. Jed himself had looked blank at the introduction and when Mary came upon him alone the same night, had been quick to confide that he'd known Lisette during a sabbatical, months he'd spent at the Salpêtrière studying and observing, the lovely young woman a fixture at the salons his friends brought him to. It had seemed an oddity, the reappearance of the woman he'd briefly known, but the War had taught her that the world was far more odd and unpredictable than she'd been lead to believe as a girl and even as a wife.

When she had walked in to the library and found them together, too close for anything other than the beginning or ending of an embrace, those two dark heads inclined towards each other, she hadn't been able to think of what to say, every thought, every word taken from her; she was mute as the boys were sometimes after battles, when the cannon still filled their ears or the screams of their friends, mouth, speech, language irrelevant. She spun on her booted foot, wishing she wore slippers, to scurry away as quietly and quickly as Plum might do, a flicker in their eyes they would forget to question. She'd let the door close behind her and the heavy carved walnut was a barrier to any cry that might have come from the other side, any murmur of interrupted reunion.

She'd hadn't run to her room on the third floor, at least she could say that. She had made her way to the stuffy boxroom she'd declared was her clinic for the women and had walked as sedately as the nuns did; no one could have suspected anything, unless it was Jed who looked into her face or her sister, Gustav dead this many months. She'd nearly mastered emptying her self from her gaze after so many deaths and so many defeats. Though this encounter had cut her, oh how brutally, how painfully! she put in all in a box, shoved it into an X and waited for a Y and a Z to make the equation something worthwhile, or perhaps the X was something she would factor out, irrelevant and obscure, an encumbrance to the delicate elegance of the problem and its eventual solution. She turned to the log she kept, the list of the women and their ailments, the treatments she tried and the outcomes, and did her best to lose herself in the data she'd assembled, looking for a pattern than might lead to something unequivocally positive, an objective good in a world she found daily more smoke and shadow. It worked, to a degree; the majority of her attention was taken with the elusive element that tied some of the women together, as fine as a strand of hair, as tenuous and binding as a spider's web, but some smaller part sat apart, worrying over what was happening behind that library door, the end to dreams she should never have allowed herself. She couldn't help wondering why it hurt to lose something she'd never had, how being deprived of a wish she'd known could never, should never come true, could cut her so. She would like to think it was her womanly pride smarting at being overlooked in the presence of another, prettier, younger woman, but she was a woeful liar, even to herself. She was telling herself she must concentrate on why she'd been sent to Mansion House, how much good she might do if she were not distracted, when she heard the rap at the door. It was not Jed. She knew what it would sound like if his hand was against the door and she hoped it was someone who would show her she was making the correct choice, Samuel or Henry Hopkins, even brusque Matron, who didn't suffer fools lightly, truly, hardly at all.

She'd called "Come in" and felt her heart beating against her breastbone as if it could flee from the room and she would follow; it was Lisette Beaufort, her dark hair arranged in a complicated style, the frill at her neck, the embroidered sash, all so foreign, so lovely, incomparable. She must be irresistable to Jed, she must seem like a message to him that all was not lost, that this beauty had been returned to him amidst such painful squalor and deprivation, to let him know there was a kind God at work, a gentleman's Gentleman ready to reward His devoted servant. It wasn't the religion she'd been brought up to, nor Gustav's more austere faith, but she thought if Jed did still believe, it must be like this. She would never get a chance to ask him now. Their conversation were sure to be restricted and superficial, practical and efficient and brisk, so he could hurry to a more enticing partner. His wife must recede, Mlle. Beaufort had some precedence from their earlier meeting, and she, Mary, was nothing but a Yankee widow of questionable worth, who'd thrown herself into this dirty hospital and been dirtied by it irrevocably.

Mlle. Beaufort walked in, glided truly, some ineffable quality about her that gave the impression of richness and delicacy, though she wore a plain bodice and dark, wide skirt. She offered a polite greeting and Mary fell back upon the comforts of etiquette, that allowed her to speak at all, while her heart was breaking and the woman who wielded the axe stood before her. She had not sought the Frenchwoman, so she did not inquire as to why she had come and hoped whatever Lisette needed to say she would express quickly and then leave her alone; she must accustom herself to that state again, though she should never have thought she could leave it behind. She couldn't have said what she expected to hear but it was not what Lisette said. _He pushed me away…_

"I don't see," she began and was interrupted.

"You do and you don't, I believe, which is why I have come. Shall we do away with all the pretty nonsense you are about to tell me, how you haven't seen anything, you didn't mean to intrude? We are not those women, no? Who hide and conceal—who pretend we don't have hearts and minds, that we are stupid so it suits others and dutiful and dull? We don't pretend out there," she said, gesturing slightly with her head and a slender hand, "And I don't think we should here. You saw me and you saw Jedediah and you have decided it means something. It does, but not what you have surmised."

Mary found that she was holding her hands in closed fists, her short nails still sharp against her palms. She was taken aback but she didn't hope, didn't dare. And there was the way Lisette had said his Christian name, her accent more pronounced as if it was the most intimate version of herself who spoke it, as perhaps she had spoken it in the morning when they'd woken together in Paris or walked together or ridden in a carriage, boxed in in dark with the street running outside the window like a river.

"He doesn't want me, though I would not admit it, would not believe it to be true. I thought he was becoming the provincial American we'd once joked about, when I knew him before, before he married, or that he was so deep in the mire of this War that he could not remember the world still offers its pleasures to us, even if some are deprived of them. I thought, you see, that I only needed to show him how sweet it could be and he would become again the man I'd known. But I have been wrong," Lisette said.

"Oh." Mary knew she must say something but anything else was beyond her. It seemed her breath was caught within her very lungs while her heart, her heart beat most painfully.

"You are not so prim with him, are you? I don't think it can be true, the way he describes you and he can't have changed so much—he never loved that wife of his, he loves a woman who is passionate, as I am, and as you must be. For he loves you very much and he is terrified now that you will not care for him since I approached him and you stood as witness. But not to all, not all, you didn't see him push me away and rage at what he thinks I have ruined for him. I can hardly believe the walls of this place still stand! What a temper he has, what a fine, impetuous ferocity!"

Lisette sounded appreciative as she named Jedediah's faults, and accurate; Mary could not stop herself from smiling, just a little, the memory of so many arguments, with her and Hale and McBurney, how dramatic he could be and how fierce. She saw the answering look in Lisette's eyes and wished they had met some other way, some other time, without him between them, to make friendship easy. That prospect seemed as far away as Abyssinia now or even the Moon.

"But he has changed. For when I knew him, he would have broken the crockery or screamed himself hoarse, then stormed out and now he is sitting alone in that library, as he has been since allowing himself only a few minutes of anger, his head in his hands. He is convinced you will not understand any of this, that you are too good, too virtuous, that you will never look at him but to see me in his arms. Men! They comprehend so little of us, don't you find? Even the best, even the ones who are curious and attend, they make every wrong assumption. As if a woman like you, who having loved him once, would stop simply because there was a barrier, and how weak this barrier is!"

Lisette had grown more expansive as she spoke. There was nothing about her that suggested dissimulation and what reason could she have had to deceive? Mary thought of Jedediah in the gloomy library, despairing at the possibility, what he thought was an eventuality, too soon arrived at, that she could not care for him any more and she wanted to shake him, to let her face show everything instead of only a little, and call him a silly fool and kiss him; if he were only to retreat, everything she did must be forward but still necessary. She looked more closely at Mlle. Beaufort and saw the artist's assessment, the woman's, the rarity of an equal.

"Why should you tell me this? I am not his wife, I am not owed any explanation," Mary said carefully, evenly.

"Isn't it always so…intriguing, when something is true and yet also entirely false? And in any case, I am not a woman motivated by debt and its repayment, nor by justice and fairness, though perhaps that shocks you more than my earlier behavior—I am an artist and a Parisian, I care for beauty and ardor, for love in its various forms finding expression, subtlety more than decision. I suspect you and I, in some other world, would find all that a very engaging discussion, but I can't bear to see your eyes any longer and he is waiting," she said and walked to the door where she paused.

"I shouldn't tarry too long, he won't come to you, though he ought, and this place has misery enough. _Bien soir_ , _madame_ ," she remarked and then left the room, setting the door in its frame so lightly Mary was neither kept in nor barred, but only parted from the whole by the thinnest veil. She could not fly to him—she must collect herself a moment and she would be decorous again in the hall, tentative at the threshold despite what Mlle. Beaufort had said. He would lift his face to her when she called his name very softly and then she would see only truth over truth, the flight of despair and so much else in its place.

"Jedediah."


End file.
